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Sexism, heroics, and assertiveness.

All three things last night combined to make me one grouchy grouchy person.

Firstly, YAY – we killed Heroic Morchok!! We still need a couple of raiders as I had to pug 2 last night because one of our guildies got stuck at work and was not online until 30 minutes after raid start, and we are still missing another actual DPS.

I was quite proud we killed a heroic boss even though it was piss easy and in truth almost as easy as normal mode. Probably buff – but was it always that easy?

We did up to Hagara in normal, however we did have a couple of cracks at Zon and Yorsahj on Heroic to see the fight and have a gander. I learn by doing, so watching videos and reading strats doesn’t give me a good idea of what happens. Now, after seeing them – albeit temporarily – I can understand the strats when reading them and I can explain it better.

Last night, I was annoyed, so annoyed. In my typical fashion I just shut up and don’t stand up for myself. I don’t like confrontation – I don’t like telling people to shut up, and I don’t know how to do that. I keep expecting people to show some respect in this game and I am always pissed when it doesn’t happen.

Now, I am not saying that everyone who plays this game are sexist wankers, but I am certain there are more than we realise. Or I have a voice that says “ignore me and everything I say because I am your raid leader”.

You can take the following as a rant of epic proportions and choose to never read this blog again, but as usual, there will be strong violence, harsh language and massive generalizations.

Last night, we had a couple of pugs as I mentioned and they knew I was a person with bewbs ( . ) ( . ) , and as far as I could tell there was no issue until they realised I was Raid leader. I started getting whispers about them leading if I needed and because they were used to doing that role they were quite happy to jump in. I said something along the lines of ok, but we should be fine, I ask for help or advice when needed. I am not the type of raid leader who isn’t willing to listen to other ideas – providing they mesh with mine 🙂

Anyway before we pulled Morchock, I asked the tanks to move the boss to the crystals when they popped. I had done enough research to know that it is a nice simple strat that has success. It also makes it easier for people to follow. Do you think that happened? After the first pull went weird…there was massive outpouring on vents about people not moving and stacking etc. I repeated myself – that had the tank been moving the mob to the crystals as I had asked it wouldn’t have been an issue. That caused more bullshit about why are we doing it that way we should do x,y,z. Someone in the guild backed my strat up and off we went again – voila once people listened to me. I also had to tell people 3 times – i kid you not – 3 times, which groups were going on which boss. Because group 1 on Morchok and group 2 on Korchom is so fucking hard to obey? So that set me up for already being annoyed because people wouldn’t listen to a simple strat and they wouldn’t listen to me when I spoke.

Once morchok was down, we grabbed a piccy, and then as we were heading down to Zonozz I was explaining to the raid that I wanted to just give him a couple of cracks on heroic to see the fight and have a play – we have to try them before we can kill them. Anyway we get to Zonozz and I start explaining how we are going to do Zonozz and what happens in the black phase. Someone pipes up about those things are only in heroic modes, followed by derogatory cynical laughter. I said with clenched teeth, I remind everyone that on the way here I said we would be trying it on heroic. Pug then says we don’t have the DPS and basically that we cant do it – not even your top DPS is doing enough, oh also its really healing intensive and they have to be really on the ball. Now, we may not have the DPS – but we did morchok on heroic…so really thats not really showing our skills since most of us had never done it anyway – I know I was all over the place because I didn’t know the fight – in fact i burnt 2 cooldowns incorrectly because I was just freaking out a little. He was blathering on about people in his guild doing 40k dps and we weren’t doing 30k…but refer previous sentence.

Anyway, we had one attempt on Zonozz, which we got to first black blood phase and then basically we wiped. So instead of coming back and doing that again – we ended up changing strats because his was better because they cleared it all the time. And? We have been raiding together as a guild for what will be our fourth week next week. We are still gearing up some people a little (although they are not bad by any stretch) and we are just starting out in heroics – of course we are not going to walk in and one shot fucking heroic bosses. But anyway, I lost control of the raid at that point because I had nothing left to say.

We then did one more attempt, wiped horribly then did it on normal and even then – there was arguments about the way we were doing that. Also no matter how many times I told people to stack together or get out – people didn’t listen, which made the fight harder – even on normal.

Yorsahj was a cock up – I even downloaded the mod which tells you which bloods to kill – apparently it is pretty accurate for most guilds starting out. However I got shot down on that as well because it is wrong apparently. However some of the choices were odd and I think caused us more issues. Anyway, we tried it twice and then did it normal.

I basically had nothing to say because everything I said was disagreed with and I don’t have the skills to just tell them to shut it and listen to me. Skills may not be the right word – I don’t have the assertiveness. As I mentioned earlier, I expect people to respect others. Saying fights will be hard if the healers aren’t “top” and DPS isn’t high enough and blah blah blah just annoys me – guilds don’t kill heroic bosses without pushing themselves to be better and get more out of their toons.

So at the end of the raid I was annoyed at myself for not being assertive enough to stand up to it, and I was annoyed that people can be so negative and that people can have so little respect for other players.

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14 comments on “Sexism, heroics, and assertiveness.”

I read you last post and was irritated by people. NOW I’M ANGRY. Our raid leader is the main (often solo) tank and she is excellent. If a guildie were to mock, denigrate or contradict her in a raid there would be uproar. The GM would have word, in and out of the raid. If it happened again you’d be looking at a /gkick. PuGs wouldn’t dare join our raid and large it. Of course they would, but they’d only get the chance to do it once. We only have one raid leader and she’s telling you what to do now so SHUT THE FUCK UP or go back to your imba guild and raid with them. Simples.

Sadly when you’re guild building you have to bite your tongue (which is why I’m so bad at it). When you actually do not have all the DPS you need when everyone is there, or god forbid a healer…a tank is not conceivable…things are very different.

I’m sure you alrerady this stuff, this is not so much advice as running through the checklist to make sure nothing has been forgotten. The most important thing is to set the tone in the guild, this is essentially the GM’s job, the officers need to back that up. If you have members with forceful personalities that support the ‘guild way’ look after them and promote them if you’re officer light.

Rules (I know rules, uurggh) are important in setting the tone. People have said to me that the rules I’ve written state the obvious and are just basic respect. That is exactly the point, your rules simply codify the respect that you expect all guildies to show one another. Then if have someone breaking these rules, these common sense ways of behaving, you have something concrete to point at and say, you ignored this simple rule and now you’re getting punished.

Include stuff like listen to the raidleader and every guild has one, and only one, raidleader. As a raider we expect you to: turn up when you sign up; be on time; repaired, gemmed, echanted and ready to perform at your best; stay for the full raid duration. Loot is raid loot; all loot makes the raid stronger; a stronger raid means more loot for everyone. If you don’t get loot be pleased that a guildie did and whatever makes the raid stronger makes you stronger. Show all guildies equal respect at all time. My personal favourite: the spirit of these rules is more important that the letter (I wrote that). That way you can’t have people hide behind the wording of the rules when it gives them an unfair advantage or someone is materially disadvantaged in a way you hadn’t imagined. You can bend of even break your own rules to be consistent with the spirit of what you wanted then.

When you’re established and have a strong core at the centre of the guild you can warn, sanction and ultimately kick people who act like pricks. In the building phase you would simply damage the guild, so you have to tolerate these fucks. Your time will come, what goes around comes around. You can bench them more frequently and rotate them out of raids and carefully lever them out of the raid team and eventually the guild.

It’s a struggle, but it is possible to set a tone and attract the kind of people who feed off that atmosphere and strengthen it. Good luck, I’m shit at it.

Yeah I think building a guild is THE worst part of the game 🙂 You have to walk such a fine line between keeping guildies and not putting up with shit.

I think it must be me though, not asserting myself and in truth I really am worse when I don’t know the fights. If I have done them just once even, I am all over it. They can sense it when I am clueless about something and they pounce like hungry lioness 🙂

Thanks for commenting though once again you are far more eloquent than I am when I am raging about something!!

I have a lot of respect for Raid Leaders, it is not an easy job to do. Having to give out directions and at the same time performing your own job well (tanking/healing/dpsing) I can only imagine be pretty stressful. We need to be more helpful to our RLs and listen to what they say or offer helpful suggestions that would benefit the group, not make their jobs difficult. Reading your stories, I think you’re doing a great job leading and keep it up, don’t let anyone else ruin it for you! =)

Grats to you guys as well Arvash 🙂 It is still heroic and has me wanting more so I think Blizzards plan has worked.

See that’s the issue with Raid leaders, we are trying to do 50 things at once, and normally I don’t mine doing it – but if people are not going to listen to even the most basic information I provide whilst not even fighting a boss, I lose my calm because it is just rudeness then…perhaps arrogance…I don’t know.

I can’t stand it when pugs come into our raids and start criticizing how we’re doing things. And I can stand sexist crap even less. In both of the raid groups for my guild, the teams are probably half and half when men and women. And guess what? The women are usually the ones kicking ass on the meters or tanking or leading. Boobs don’t get in the way of pushing buttons, nor do they get in the way of leading a group.

Agreed, boobs shouldn’t be the difference between respecting people, of course I don’t mind people coming in and offering suggestions, but disagreeing with everything and saying we sucked in a round a bout kind of way was not how a pug should behave.

This is exactly why I’ll never {again} lead a raid group in current content. Being the RL is like being a pre-school teacher. But instead of saying “Timmy, we don’t eat paste” you’re saying “Tank, move the boss here”. And the whole time, the rest of the class is running around like monkeys after binge drinking espresso. Kudos to you and all other folks willing to step up and take this kind of Tauren-poo as a raid leader.

One effective technique requires vent admin: I’ve seen where the RL mutes all in vent but themselves. You still have jabber jabber in raid chat, but at least vent is clear.

Another has been where the RL gives one warning: “Stop doing X. If you don’t stop in the next 10 seconds I’m going to kick you”. And 10 seconds later /boot. That may not be possible, but it’s a nice deterrence for the rest of the group to shape up.

This all works for great for PUGgers. Internal guild disrespect is another issue altogether and that would drive me frigging ballistic. If you have the numbers, alts that want to run help ensure people are on their best behavior. If not… it just sucks.

And by the by, the best raid leaders I’ve ever raided with all had boobs. Maybe it’s just me or maybe I’m “trained” with a 10+ year marriage, but in either case I’ve got no issues following orders from women. Hooray for boobies!

I actually really enjoy being a raid leader – despite my whinging 🙂 I love the sense of accomplishment when people obey me and trust me to just get in there and do it, to see bosses killed, knowing I had a part in that makes me feel proud, of myself and my team. Yeah, I see everyone as MY team.

I don’t mind people chatting on vents and having a laugh, but when I am talking – i want people to listen! I hope to eventually have enough people in the raiding team that I can boot people like that, I don’t want to be wasting time waiting for people to be accepting ready checks or getting drinks etc and I would love to just pull others in. I need a damn warlock to do that though :o) or get the guild up high enough for the summoning…which of course we won’t be having in MoP 😦 But you follow me 🙂

LOL I am glad to see you are being trained well then as well 🙂 Apparently boobies are very fun, but I think that must be a guy thing…or a girl thing …LOL!